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Emil DeAndreis - Beyond Folly

Saturday, April 19, 2014 - 6:00pm

Please join us on Saturday, April 19 at 6:00 p.m. as we welcome Emil DeAndreis for a reading and book signing! DeAndreis will be reading from his newest book Beyond Folley! Emil is a twenty-eight year old San Francisco native. He is currently a substitute teacher, high school baseball coach, and MFA student at San Francisco State University.

Beyond Folly, is a comical commentary on the life of a substitute teacher in the San Francisco Unified School District, as told through the eyes of the fictional character, Horton Hagardy. Through Horton's adventures (and woes), readers are taken "on the front lines of the education system, in the trenches, so to speak of what it feels like to face the everyday challenges of being a teacher on call."

Some reviews for Beyond Folly:

"The further one reads in Beyond Folly, the more one comes to understand the choreography behind its farcical panoply of strange characters in absurd circumstances. As with A Confederacy of Dunces, the deadpan, staggering weirdness of it all is a veil to cover piercing insight into how we deal with being human, tribal, and hopeful."

—Robert Lieberman, Conte

"What makes it stand above other "funny" and "touching" life-in-my-profession writing, though, is the Kurt Vonnegut way it pulls away the veils we use to lie to ourselves about how we'd like to think things work inside the institutions that we entrust to keep our lives going . . . We all, however, have to go to school, or to eventually be led and cared for by those currently in school. So in these days of Arne Duncan and Common Core and SLOs, and certainly in the aftermath of No Child Left Behind, Beyond Folly isn't just a hilarious account of what in fact goes on in many classrooms as a result of so many well-meaning "reforms," it's downright scary. Must read."